Note: This is extrememly inefficient and will not earn any bitcoin. You will just burn through Azure credits. Purchasing a $30 USB device is ~100000x faster.

TL;DR The commands to create a machine in Azure to CPU mine are at the bottom. But don’t bother.

I have been playing with the blockchain lately, most notably the programmable blockchain Ethereum. I was interested in seeing how difficult it was to set up a machine to mine Bitcoin. What I discovered through my research was that it is possible, but pointless to do CPU mining in the cloud.

Why is mining on Azure bad?

While it is easy to set it up, CPU mining is extremely inefficient. Mining on CPUs was depreceated a long time ago when it was discovered that it was faster to do on GPUs. But now even GPUs have been deprecated in favor of power efficient ASIC machines

add the miner to startup. Edit /etc/rc.local to add it
sudo nano /etc/rc.local
Then on a line before exit 0, add the full path of your startup command with & at the end of the line
e.g. /home/youruser/cpuminerXYZ/minerd -o stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:3333 –u <username_workernumber> -p X &